![]() ![]() Despite evoking a measure of working-class authenticity and depicting the abuse Davies’s siblings and mother suffered at the hands of his psychotic father (played by an astonishing Pete Postlethwaite), Distant Voices, Still Lives had little interest in ‘kitchen-sink realism’, using minimal dialogue, highly composed ‘unreal’ images, and pub chants and piano-side singalongs in place of traditional cause-and-effect dialogue, while The Long Day Closes wafts to the unsettled brain patterns of a child named Bud (Davies’s nickname growing up) living in that sadly brief sliver of time after his father mercifully died and before the nightmare of puberty took over. These films also proved that Davies had little interest in traditional schools of British realism. These tiny yet monumental films, forming what would become known as The Terence Davies Trilogy, paved the way for his feature breakthroughs of Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, radically nonlinear experiments in autobiography, memory and music that feel more like woven tapestries of feeling than traditional movie narratives. In an update of the 1996 made-for-television movie, this film explores the issue of emotionally and physically abusive teen relationships. Rarely in cinema has there been a more striking image of death but also of the possibility of change, despite its inescapable funereal tone. And miraculously, in this very first attempt at moviemaking, Davies would happen upon one of the most brilliant visual compositions in his entire career – Davies’s surrogate character, the boy Tucker, and his mother being quite literally erased from a window as his father’s coffin is slid into a hearse, an image made possible via a zoom out on a double-reflection (the front door and a second window across the street). Terrified, as he had never even been on a movie set before, Davies would describe the experience as miserable, yet the short film, finished in 1976, a startlingly grim black-and-white interpretation of his own childhood, his deeply ingrained guilt over his homosexuality, and the excruciating death of his abusive father, was clearly the work of a major filmmaker in training: the pacing, the composition, the performance style – all augured a career fuelled by a singular vision.
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